A recently proposed law gives parents the ability to choose the sex of their child when conceiving through in vitro fertilization, a process that’s become more popular over the years.

This choice isn’t given to parents because they’d rather have a boy instead of a girl; it’s a little more complicated than that. The proposed law could only be used in situations where the child is at risk of inheriting genetic diseases.

The Minister for Health in Ireland on the 3 October 2017disclosed a decision by Government to approve the drafting of a bill on assisted human reproduction (AHR) and associated research. Three days later a general scheme of the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill 2017 was published. This month, the bill went to Ireland’s Oireachtas health committee for scrutiny (see BioNews 934), after which it will go back to the Irish government for a final bill to be drafted. This is very exciting as it will be the first legislation in Ireland on assisted reproduction: setting up a legislative and regulatory structure under which the practice of AHR may operate.

Brigitte Adams became the poster child for freezing your eggs. But things didn’t quite work out how she imagined.

Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”

Anna Howat offered to carry her sister Beth Gaudino’s baby after Gaudino and her husband, Justin, lost twins at 20 weeks. Charlotte Grace was born on Tuesday at Hartford Hospital fulfilling the Gaudino’s dream of becoming parents. Both families live in Tolland.

In a sixth-floor room at Hartford Hospital, Anna Howat cradled the niece she gave birth to Tuesday.

For the last nine months, Anna, 29, has carried the biological child of her sister and brother-in-law, who tried without success to have a child for years. And on Jan. 23, at 9:33 p.m., Charlotte Grace Gaudino came out of her aunt’s womb and screaming into the world.

Last April, Anna came to her sister, Beth Gaudino, with a proposition: Anna, who had struggled herself with fertility issues before giving birth to a daughter in 2015, was willing to carry her sister’s child.

The birth of Kim Kardashian West’s third child didn’t just prompt conversations about the choice of the baby’s name, Chicago—it also ignited new discussions about surrogacy. West’s surrogacy story is hardly indicative of the norm (sources say she was “pampered” by the couple during pregnancy), but her decision to give birth via surrogate is certainly in line with modern parenting trends. While it has been around for more than 30 years, gestational surrogacy transfers have nearly doubled since 2015.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to get pregnant, and will spend many thousands more on my surrogate. And there’s still no guarantee of a baby.

When I began trying to get pregnant five years ago, I assumed it would happen easily, quickly, without too much expense. I come from highly fertile stock: My mom got pregnant after her tubes were tied; my sister got pregnant again three months after giving birth. As a single woman, I knew it wouldn’t be free, though. I’d need to get sperm and, since I didn’t plan to attempt the process at home, turkey baster style, I’d also have to involve medical professionals. But it wouldn’t take long to get pregnant, right?

Surrogacy – a word recently dragged kicking and screaming into the limelight by the pop-couple Kardashian-West. What caused the outcry? Kim’s decision: the mother of two would not bear their third child herself. Worldwide the topic of surrogacy sparks debate. Leaving ethics aside for a moment, should the legal aspects of surrogacy be influenced by social, political or geographical factors?

Surrogacy is not a concept or practice foreign to South Africa. The Children’s Act of 2005 prescribes that all surrogacy arrangements are to be governed by a “surrogacy motherhood agreement” (SMA), the validity of which must be confirmed by a court. A recent decision handed down by the Johannesburg High Court highlighted a few requirements for such confirmation. The judgment arguably opens the door to social, political and or geographical discrimination.

This story has it all – a same-sex couple, a court battle over immigration, baby twins and even a tie to the federal government shutdown at the start of the week.

Lawyers for a Los Angeles-based same-sex couple have filed suit against the federal government, alleging that the U.S. State Department is discriminating against them by denying birthright citizenship to one of their twin sons.

Young women see the ads on their Facebook feeds, in a college newspaper, even posted on Craig’s List.

They read: “Donate your eggs,” Help a family” and “Make some money.”

But what are the long-term risks to the egg donor?

It’s a question that weighs heavily on Dr. Jennifer Schneider’s mind. Her daughter, Jessica Grace Wing, was slender, vivacious and beautiful. She was a non-smoker, vegetarian, a yoga enthusiast, talented musician, composer and filmmaker.

A gay couple has created a conundrum for the Singaporean government by attempting to adopt a child born of an American surrogate mother. The two unnamed men, both Chinese, aged 45 with high salaries, paid a California woman US$200,000 to provide an egg and to gestate a baby, who was born in 2013.